Moving upon Silence: Music, Landscape, and Environment

Among the most unexpected and disconcerting side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the silence that has accompanied much of the lockdown. Despite the creative flowering of impromptu balcony concerts and online musical events that it has in some places provoked, the quietness of much of the pandemic has often seemed deafening. As countries emerge tentatively (or, in some cases, recklessly) out of the quarantine measures imposed to try to contain the global spread of the infection, there is an opportunity to reflect on the meanings and values of that silence. For some, it is indelibly associated with absence: the agonizing loss of friends and relatives or of patterns of work and sources of income that have sustained livelihoods and maintained well-being. For others, especially in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests following the brutal killing of George Floyd, silence can only mean condonement or complicity, an act of amnesia or betrayal that perpetuates such violence rather than address its systemic and institutional origins. And for others, silence has been an opportunity to reconnect or reattune, to attend to environmental sounds and ambient noise in new and defamiliarized contexts, and to take stock in relation to surroundings that seem irrevocably changed and transformed: the sudden lack of aircraft or road traffic, the memory of a loved-one’s voice, or the mute response to historical injustice. Silence in the bewilderingly contradictory era of COVID-19 simultaneously signals despair, hope, isolation, and immersion.

The ambiguous quality of this silence has been captured by a number of initiatives and artistic schemes. The Dawn Chorus Project led by sound artist Bernie Krause, for instance, is exemplary in its acknowledgment of the human catastrophe caused by COVID-19 and its urgent call for environmental restitution. “The dramatic silencing of human activities that it has caused,” Krause writes of the pandemic on the project website, “is also making the voices of nature resound on an unprecedented scale. In this unique situation in the spring of 2020, the idea was born to make the birds’ voices heard.”¹ Supported by the Bavarian Museum of the Life Sciences and Environment and the Nantesbuch Foundation, the Dawn Chorus Project has created a citizen science platform onto which users can upload sound recordings of the dawn chorus in their neighborhood, creating, Krause suggests, “a worldwide birdsong concert for the sciences and the arts.”² Traced onto a global sound map, the inventory of recordings is a moving testimony both to nature’s resilience and to the virus’s international reach. As a contemporary record of habitat loss and biodiversity, it has particular scientific value: it offers an auditory snapshot of our current relationship with the natural world, the acoustic veil of the Anthropocene. Yet the data also conceals the intractable realities of class and social inequality. The geographical distribution of recordings as of August 2020 speaks all too vividly of persisting asymmetries of power and human resource: the South African examples, for instance, are drawn almost exclusively from the protected areas within Table Mountain National Park, but there is nothing from the shanty settlements of Khayelitsha, Langa or Gugulethu. Listening to the dawn chorus in the sylvan surrounds of Constantia or Rondebosch assumes a very different social-political register from that of the Cape Flats.

Sound artists, ethnomusicologists, and other music scholars have for many years insisted that it matters where we listen, and that the silence which might prevail is inevitably shaped and determined by particular cultural-historic legacies. Peter Cusack’s eloquent essay in acoustic journalism, Sounds from Dangerous Places,³ echoes this preoccupation with music, sound, landscape, and environment. Traveling through the ruins of abandoned Samosel villages within the Chernobyl evacuation zone in Ukraine, two decades after the disaster at the nuclear reactor which spread radioactive material over wide parts of northern and western Europe, for example, he writes: “the quiet is absolute. Traffic and planes are unthinkable. Only birds and wind can be heard. But there is a strong sense of absence too, of those who lived here, of the disaster that destroyed any continuity with past generations, and the disruptions faced since.”⁴ This uncanny absence strangely foreshadows the COVID-19 pandemic. As for Krause, it is the “passionate, species-rich dawn chorus” celebrated in Cusack’s recordings that becomes Chernobyl’s “keynote,” and which serves as one of the areas “definitive sounds.”⁵ For its former inhabitants, sound, and landscape are inextricably bound up with their experience of displacement and the legacy of enforced resettlement, even in cases where they have in fact returned to their original homes and dwellings. Their singing superficially suggests some form of Romantic idyll:

Oh my beloved village,
The silence of your marshes,
The breadth of your skies,
Your songs,
And your fields caressed by the sun.

But in the striking strength and richness of their voices, beautifully captured by Cusack’s microphone, there is a deeper undertone of fracture and loss. Such intensity ultimately points to a hollowness, the desolation and emptiness of what has been left behind: peeling wallpaper in a bedroom, broken glass, or a deserted Kindergarten.

Perhaps such silence should not come as a surprise after all, since in some ways it has always lain at the heart of a particular western landscape epistemology. The emergence of a distinctive landscape aesthetic, or way of thinking about the culturally sedimented relationships between land, environment, and human agency, coincided in the early modern period with the invention of perspective as a visual means of social-political representation. In its elevation of a viewer’s privileged point of spectatorship, perspective encoded highly asymmetrical hierarchies of authority, control, and domination. It was preoccupied by boundaries, borders, mapping, and directionality. Yet despite its attempt to conceal or obscure less desirable or regulated elements of its scenic prospects, perspective has always hinted at or suggested precisely that which it has sought to dominate or remove. Music has responded intensively to such imperatives: the empty sounds and silences that answer Orfeo’s lamenting calls in Monteverdi’s eponymous opera, for example, are landscape’s shady acoustic mirror, the real sonic reflection of the sunlit Arcadian realm from which Eurydice has been erased. Though Orfeo can return from the underworld, his landscape is now broken and bereft. Musical enchantment merely belies the loss that lies within. It sounds what perspective seeks to exclude.

Similar moments of silence puncture or underpin later musical evocations of landscape. The hollow octaves that frame the final bars of Haydn’s F Minor Variations, Hob. XVII:6, for example, suggest precisely that same emptiness, as do the halting gaps between the musical oar strokes in “Die Stadt” from Schubert’s Schwanengesang and the strangely opaque bars that resound in the final number, “Lualåt,” from Grieg’s Stemninger, op. 73. In each case, landscape appears not so much as a void or abyss, but as blank space, a series of vanishing points that might equally indicate infinite extension, convergence, disappearance, or departure. In the era of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is easy to hear those blank spaces only negatively, bound up with the collateral damage of a largely mishandled global crisis. But their ambivalence also permits alternative readings. As Holly Watkins has recently argued in her Musical Vitalities, it is possible to conceive of sound and music in holistic, ecocritical ways: “Musical beauty resembles that of leaves and flowers,” she suggests, “because it is, in its own way, a living thing, meaning that it also passes away.”⁶ Positively embracing the fleeting contingency of musical events might, in other words, prompt a different way of relating to the environment, through landscape, by acknowledging our own transience, permeability, and interconnectedness. Hence, Watkins writes, music’s “acoustic manifestation of dynamic processes and patterns . . . finds meaning in beauty for no other reason than that it is here, now. The flower will soon wilt, the music someday go stale.”⁷

Silence amid COVID-19 assuredly offers a place for solace, or a moment to grieve. But it is also an injunction, not merely to remember and record past histories of exclusion or loss, but to attend to and accept responsibility. Only then, in landscape, can we begin to hear again.

1. Dawn Chorus Project, accessed August 31, 2020, https://dawn-chorus.org.
2. Ibid.
3. Peter Cusack, Sounds from Dangerous Places (London: ReR Megacorp, 2012).
4. Ibid., 19.
5. Ibid.
6. Holly Watkins, Musical Vitalities: Ventures in Biotic Aesthetics of Music (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 65.
7. Ibid.